Microsoft Teams is nearing its official debut. Designed as a hub for teamwork, the cloud-based Teams gives employees access to content, tools, people and conversations within the Office 365 environment. Groups and subgroups can communicate and collaborate using text-based chat, file sharing, and video and voice chats.

The big question is how Microsoft Teams will compete with Slack, a fan favorite in the hot enterprise team-collaboration market.

“If you look at the basics – if you took the two products as they are, side by side, without looking at any integrations or other ecosystem things – you wouldn’t really think one was overwhelmingly better than the other,” says Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd, a peer-to-peer business software review platform. “There’s not a significant difference in the base product.”

Slack has momentum on its side, however, plus an open-platform approach and an arsenal of tie-ins to third-party tools that have served to win over users and entrench Slack within companies.